Rain Check

Finally, some rain came Caracas’ way, and caraqueños were thankful. But it took less that 48 hours from the beginning of the chaparrón for caraqueños to remember why they hate rain so much.

Yes, the yellow haze that’s been hovering over the city seems to have left, and the temperature is back on this side of bearable. But that came at a price: so far 68 rain related incidents have been reported, while the levels of the Guaire River that runs through Caracas went up over two meters during the recent downpours. There’s fallen trees, flooded neighborhoods, and a friggin’ police station now underwater; the spread of the impact is as wide as the valley Caracas lies in. And brace yourselves, fellow capitalinos: INAMEH, the National Meteorological Institute, estimates 48 more hours of rain.

The beginning of the rainy season is always a reminder of how foreign the concept of prevention is to Venezuelans. It crossed nobody’s mind to sweep garbage and dead leaves out of the drainage systems, and we’re yet again paying the price of chronic negligence.

Images from all over town, from the impoverished downtown to the fancy-shmancy southeast, reveal how fragile the concepct of “normalcy” in Caracas is. All it takes is two bouts of rain for things to go haywire. Granted, it did rain a lot, but this is peanuts compared to the monsoon-like rainy seasons we’ve seen in years past (Deslave de Vargas, anyone?).

It’s a matter of time before the government switches its discourse from “we desperately need more rain” to “we were not prepared for this much rain”. Because, as we all know, it’s the weather, and not the government, that has Venezuela in the shitter.